


souls on the outside.

by peradi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Daemons, Drabbles, Gen, daemon AU, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 16:09:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6572965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/pseuds/peradi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things you cannot hide. </p><p>(a brief meditation on the daemons of the universe's greatest legends. and greedo gets a look in as well.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	souls on the outside.

**Author's Note:**

> the daemon au no one asked for. proper fic may well follow. if you have requests for more daemon fic ask me @swearydroid on tumblr.

 

Ben Kenobi's daemon is a great gaunt dog -- perhaps, once upon a time, she was soft-furred and lovely, wet-eyed and kind -- but now she is tired and worn-down from desert life, fur clumping up in clots, eyes dull. The longer she spends around Luke the livelier she gets; by the time her master collapses, dead on the ground, she is almost back to her former glory, muscles tight under her shining coat. 

(There was, once, a boy called Obi Wan. His daemon -- Demeter -- was the bravest of hounds, the most beautiful. Statues were carved in her honour. Artists painted her likeness from one end of the galaxy to the other. All that artwork is long gone, burned to ash by a vengeful, bitter boy who used to be called Skywalker.)

 

* * *

 

 

"What the hell is it?"

"A firebird," says Anakin, pouting oh-so prettily, Ares hopping from his shoulder to his wrist. Her great gold wings flare wider, all the better to display her magnificence. "A phoenix. Isn't she lovely?"

Obi Wan doesn't ask how she settled; he already knows. A lover's touch will cement a daemon's form, and Padme's eyes are always simmering with adoration. 

(Love: it takes and it takes and it takes, and it so often takes more than we can give.)

 

* * *

 

 

Darth Vader does not have a daemon. He does not need one.

(Luke's hair is brilliant gold, bright as fire. Just before he dies, Vader fancies that wings sprout from his boy's back, spread wide, all the better to display his magnificence. 

( _You can lose your soul_ , says Ares, when he reaches the other side,  _but you can always find it again.)_

 

* * *

 

 

Padme's daemon is a spindle-legged doe, beautiful and kind. 

She never stood a chance. 

 

* * *

 

 

Han's Theia is a Corellian Hunting Dog – mottled black, tan and white, cocky and beautiful and proud. She’s got half her left ear chewed off, and a scar running jagged over her right eye, and he more often than not refers to her as _scruffy nerfherder’s cur_ and she calls him _stupid smuggler boy_. 

 

* * *

 

 

Leia’sHyperion is a caracal, sharp angled and dignified, but without any of the laziness of other politician’s daemons – he’s always looking this way and that, and his yellow eyes are frighteningly intense when they latch onto you. (The first time he stares down Theia she whines, just a bit. The cat is younger than she, and slighter, and smaller – her jaws could, theoretically, crush his eggshell skull with one bite.)

(Theoretically. They couldn’t, not really, and she looks away and later Han will rebuke her for her cowardice – _he’s just a kitten Theia, really?_  – and Theia will shove her head into his lap and snarl back, _A princess and a prince, nerfherder. We don’t stand a chance.)_

 

* * *

 

 

Luke’sdaemon, Helios, takes an unusually long time to settle. When he’s just a moisture farmer dreaming of adventure she’s always a bird of some kind, bright-winged and never still; but then his aunt and uncle die in fire and fury, and she starts aping Theia’s form, becoming canid, vicious, broad-chested, ready to fight and die for him. Then they meet Leia, and she starts to spend more and more time as a cat: a great, sleek jaguar with bright eyes and a  throaty purr. Nothing fits; nothing feels right. He asks Yoda: _how do I know who I am when she won’t settle? How can I be a Jedi if I can’t even know my own soul?_

_Patience, you must have. Time, it will tell._

_(_ Anakin Skywalker dies with his face open to the air, his son bent-backed over him. His father’s breath rattles to nothing. The Death Star burns. It’s only some time after, when he wakes sobbing from another dream, that he realises that Helios has been a grey owl for quite a while. _Time it will tell_ , thinks Luke, and presses his face into the crook of her wing.)

 

* * *

 

 

Admiral Ackbar’s species keep their daemons in the ancestral swamp. They can travel miles from them, miles from the planet they call home, but their souls will always remain there -– quite literally. Ackbar, star-mapper and resistance legend, is an exception. He has a special tank prepared for his Krynda and keeps her aboard ship. He is a pilot, and his soul belongs in the stars. 

 

* * *

 

 

Greedohas an insect that resembles a giant dragonfly. Her name isn’t known to any but Greedo himself, for his race believe that it is the worst sort of ill-luck to tell others the name of your soul. She’s sharp-eyed, a watchful and clever guide, skilled at getting him out of trouble, ensuring that his blaster is always the first to fire –

Until, of course, she is not. 

 

* * *

 

 

Landohas a red macaw; a beautiful, chattery bird that people coo over and forget the strength of her beak. She’s the one who ripped off part of Theia’s ear (Theia has long since forgiven her.) His culture, rather like Greedo’s, keeps the True Name of their daemon secret – but her nickname, Featherface (guess who gave her that?), serves well enough. 

 

* * *

 

 

Huxhas a red-gold snake, heavy-scaled and venom-fanged, languorous in the way she curls around his throat. She’s named Indomina. She does not move move much (most high-ranking First Order officers are Severed; Hux is no exception) , but her spite-bright eyes take in every flicker and flutter of her surroundings and she’ll hiss advice into Hux’s ear when no one is watching (they cannot read each other’s thoughts anymore. They were Severed so long ago that they barely remember what it feels like to move and act as one.)

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo Renhas a borzoi, shaggy-furred and unkempt with blood-reeking breath and dull black eyes. She had a name, once, when she belonged to a boy named Ben Solo – but that boy is dead, and the name has been cast aside like ash, and she spends most of her time dozing in his quarters, whining in her fretful slumber. He thought that the Severing would have ended her, but it has not, and he cannot bring himself to kill her (why not? why not? he should he should, and yet –)

(When things grow a little to hard to bear -- as they often do, when the scavenger escapes, when Hux's smirks are too much -- then he'll turn on her. Kick her pathetic soft flank until she spits up blood, until she stares up at him with a shivering, wet gaze.  _You're nothing!_ he shouts.  _I know_ , she replies.)

(He kills Han Solo and without knowing why he buries his face in her coat. She drags her tongue along his cheek.)

 

* * *

 

 

Phasmahas a lioness, Victory, a great gold beast with hooked claws and muscles tight under her mottled, scarred coat. She’s not Severed: most Stormtroopers aren’t (the First Order is pragmatic. Severed men and women make excellent strategists, cold-blooded and fanatical, but Severed soldiers find it hard to form the human connections essential for working as a unit.)

(Hux once suggested to Phasma that they could Sever some of her younger troopers as an experiment. Victory shows her canines and Indomina curls tighter about Hux’s white throat. He never broaches the topic again.)

 

* * *

 

 

Poehas a swift, the sort of bird not meant to land; her legs are so little, her wings so grand; she sleeps on the wing, soars for miles, can never feel at home without the sky all around her. Her name’s Maria, and her feather’s are the exact shade of Dameron’s hair. (She has a habit of fussing with his curls, arranging them to their best advantage, while chiding him for being vain.) 

(She tends to do this around Finn, not that the trooper notices.)

It pains her to walk. Her left leg is crooked from where Kylo Ren snatched at her, dangling her before Dameron’s agonized face. _I can take what I want_ , he had said, monster, mutilated monster whose daemon slept on, nightmaring her thin, squalid life away. 

 _The resistance is not intimidated by you!_ Maria had twittered. Kylo Ren snapped her ankle with a clutch of metal fingers.

 

* * *

 

 

Reyhas an eagle owl. He looks absurdly huge on the sharp slant of her shoulder, tawny-winged and orange-eyed, talons the size of her face – but there’s a strange sort of gentleness to him, in the way he dips his head to chatter his beak against BB-8′s shell. (moments after flaring his wings out in a threat display that sends BB-8′s would-be kidnapper racing away.) Her parents must have named him something, they must have done, but she cannot recall _what_   – for years and years she calls him nothing at all, not wanting to replace the name she cannot call to mind. ( _You have to call me something,_  he said, as the hot teeth of Jakku wind scraped at the outside of their hut.) 

_(What if they come back and you’re named something else? That’s like I’ve forgotten them. Like I’ve moved on. I’ll remember your name when I meet my family, I will. When I see them again, I’ll know what to call you.)_

On the Falcon, on the way to Luke Skywalker, she says to him, “I’ve always liked Han, as a name.”

 

* * *

 

 

Finnhas a dog. Well. He thinks he has a dog. Most troopers have some kind of canine daemon, some sharp-toothed, obedient beast that will attack on command. Finn’s daemon is grey furred and huge, but gentle with it; she never tests her teeth on the flanks of her comrades, and she sleeps coiled tight against him (not at the foot of his bed like the daemons of most recruits. He gets teased for this mercilessly; to be so dependent on your daemon is a mark of weakness.)

( _Nice wolf you’ve got there,_  Han Solo will say, later. _Biggest I’ve ever seen.)_

She is known as FN-2186 as well, because the First Order does not give different designations for the daemons of troopers. She is _terrified_ when Maria suggests that she take another name; she thinks, for one mad moment, that they are going to be split asunder. 

(she and Finn are the same, the same heart and soul, and to give them different names is to try and separate them. She knows what happens to troopers who do not comply. She knows what decommissioning means.)

Later, she learns that the Resistance see Severance as the worst kind of abomination and not a disciplinary measure. She learns that she is free, finally, and she asks Finn to give her a name. Without a breath of hesitation he says, “Rey. I’m going to call you Rey."

 


End file.
